Thursday, February 15, 2007
Guthrie family's American roots
By Wally Dobelis L'Attitudes contributor (also reprinted in The Keysnoter
Scores turn out for legacy tour in Tavernier
The legacy of Woody Guthrie, author of the third best-known American anthem (unofficial, after “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful,” bumping shoulders with “God Bless America”) is carried forth by members of his second family, now in their fourth generation.The Guthrie Family Legacy Tour is playing on a national circuit, and we heard them in Tavernier on a rainy night Feb. 12 in the 769-seat auditorium of Coral Shores High School.The above numbers, my concoction, are historically correct. The anti-fascist and anti-racist folk hero troubadour, born in 1912 as Woodrow Wilson Guthrie in Okemah, Okla., son of a broke cowboy/land speculator/politician, was an early Okie dust-bowl departee, moving in 1931 to California to sing with wife Mary Jennings and three children.
By 1939 he was in New York, hooking up with Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers (later the Weavers), composing union and social protest songs, and eventually writing a sometime column for the Daily Worker. But protest and anti-fascism and anti-racism were his objectives, not communism, and he was unscathed by the congressional committee investigators.Thus Woody, a giant natural but musically untrained talent, continued to write verse and add such music as he deemed appropriate, and perform. Hundreds of folksingers and millions of music lovers took his message to their hearts, and Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Phil Ochs paid tribute by copying his style.Meanwhile, he built a new family with dancer Marjorie Mazie in 1946 with three children: Arlo, Joady and Nora. Arlo's children Abe, Cathy, Annie and Sarah Lee and the latter's husband Johnny Irion, plus all-around musician Gordon Titcomb, comprise the basic traveling tour, other members dropping in and out. Nora actually runs the Guthrie Foundation, administering the 3,500 song lyrics found after Woody's death in 1967, with some of them used in the successful 15-song “Mermaid Avenue” record by Billy Bragg and Wilco in 2000. A second edition was released soon after.
But I'm racing ahead, like an Arlo Guthrie monologue. In the late 1940s, Woody started ailing of an unknown disease. He sought relief in California, marrying artist Anneke van Kirk, and having another daughter, Lorinna Lynn. But the disorder - eventually identified as the rare Huntington's disease, the physical and mental disease that institutionalized and killed his mother - persisted, and he was institutionalized off and on, starting in 1954, eventually passing away in 1967 at the Creedmor State Hospital in Queens, N.Y.Now to the performance. Arlo is a wild-haired leader, who makes up the program as he moves along, singing songs whose lyrics he can remember at the moment, he claims. It starts with a Woody review, adding some Arlo numbers, all following a guitar-heavy beat, interrupted by Arlo's far-ranging monologues that break everyone up (he sometimes loses the point, but recovers), until some lyric Sarah Lee and Johnny Irian numbers lighten the load.It is a nostalgia trip, but not overly, with light politics, a positive discourse on the individual's impact on society (the unknown man who told Joseph his brethren went thataway was responsible for him being sold to the Egyptians, for Moses, Israel and the world as we know it, and such). An ancient wire recording of Woody's rambling gave a genetic clue of Arlo's predispositions.
Tributes to Steve Goodman's “City of New Orleans” (“Good Night America”) and Cisco Houston's “St. James Infirmary Blues” eventually led up to the piece de resistance, “Alice's Restaurant,” Arlo's 1968 debut masterpiece, an 18-minute monologue spoken over the short tune of “You Can Get Anything You Want at Alice's Restaurant,” about an arrest for littering that led to his draft deferment during the Vietnam War and some global conclusions, that brought the audience to its feet.The concluding “This Land Is Your Land,” interrupted by reminiscences, almost anti-climactic, nevertheless heightened the experience.The Guthrie Family Legacy Tour playing in Tavernier consisted of Arlo, daughter Sarah Lee and son-in-law Johnny Irion (a 4-year-old granddaughter also made a stage appearance), as well as son Abe Guthrie, an accomplished keyboard artist and vocalist and leader of his own Xavier band; and Gordon Titcomb, a pedal-steel artist, whose mandolin provides the punctuation to a guitar and two-keyboard (Arlo also plays one) performance.The tour, riding the Amtrak City of New Orleans train in 2006, performed benefits for the victims of Katrina, along with their record sales rising over $140,000.As to the unofficial anthems, Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land is Your Land” in 1940, adapting the tune of a Baptist hymn as a reaction to Irving Berlin's “God Bless America,” which he considered unrealistic. The latter, written and stashed in the composer's trunk while he was a soldier at Camp Yaphank, in 1918, was rescued by Kate Smith 20 years later and, most notably, sung by the members of Congress on the United States Capitol steps on Sept. 11, 2001.“America the Beautiful” was written by Wellesley English professor Katharine Lee Bates in 1882 while on a trip, put to the tune of the 1882 Baptist hymn “Materna,” composed by Samuel A. Ward, and became popular around 1910.
By Wally Dobelis L'Attitudes contributor (also reprinted in The Keysnoter
Scores turn out for legacy tour in Tavernier
The legacy of Woody Guthrie, author of the third best-known American anthem (unofficial, after “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful,” bumping shoulders with “God Bless America”) is carried forth by members of his second family, now in their fourth generation.The Guthrie Family Legacy Tour is playing on a national circuit, and we heard them in Tavernier on a rainy night Feb. 12 in the 769-seat auditorium of Coral Shores High School.The above numbers, my concoction, are historically correct. The anti-fascist and anti-racist folk hero troubadour, born in 1912 as Woodrow Wilson Guthrie in Okemah, Okla., son of a broke cowboy/land speculator/politician, was an early Okie dust-bowl departee, moving in 1931 to California to sing with wife Mary Jennings and three children.
By 1939 he was in New York, hooking up with Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers (later the Weavers), composing union and social protest songs, and eventually writing a sometime column for the Daily Worker. But protest and anti-fascism and anti-racism were his objectives, not communism, and he was unscathed by the congressional committee investigators.Thus Woody, a giant natural but musically untrained talent, continued to write verse and add such music as he deemed appropriate, and perform. Hundreds of folksingers and millions of music lovers took his message to their hearts, and Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Phil Ochs paid tribute by copying his style.Meanwhile, he built a new family with dancer Marjorie Mazie in 1946 with three children: Arlo, Joady and Nora. Arlo's children Abe, Cathy, Annie and Sarah Lee and the latter's husband Johnny Irion, plus all-around musician Gordon Titcomb, comprise the basic traveling tour, other members dropping in and out. Nora actually runs the Guthrie Foundation, administering the 3,500 song lyrics found after Woody's death in 1967, with some of them used in the successful 15-song “Mermaid Avenue” record by Billy Bragg and Wilco in 2000. A second edition was released soon after.
But I'm racing ahead, like an Arlo Guthrie monologue. In the late 1940s, Woody started ailing of an unknown disease. He sought relief in California, marrying artist Anneke van Kirk, and having another daughter, Lorinna Lynn. But the disorder - eventually identified as the rare Huntington's disease, the physical and mental disease that institutionalized and killed his mother - persisted, and he was institutionalized off and on, starting in 1954, eventually passing away in 1967 at the Creedmor State Hospital in Queens, N.Y.Now to the performance. Arlo is a wild-haired leader, who makes up the program as he moves along, singing songs whose lyrics he can remember at the moment, he claims. It starts with a Woody review, adding some Arlo numbers, all following a guitar-heavy beat, interrupted by Arlo's far-ranging monologues that break everyone up (he sometimes loses the point, but recovers), until some lyric Sarah Lee and Johnny Irian numbers lighten the load.It is a nostalgia trip, but not overly, with light politics, a positive discourse on the individual's impact on society (the unknown man who told Joseph his brethren went thataway was responsible for him being sold to the Egyptians, for Moses, Israel and the world as we know it, and such). An ancient wire recording of Woody's rambling gave a genetic clue of Arlo's predispositions.
Tributes to Steve Goodman's “City of New Orleans” (“Good Night America”) and Cisco Houston's “St. James Infirmary Blues” eventually led up to the piece de resistance, “Alice's Restaurant,” Arlo's 1968 debut masterpiece, an 18-minute monologue spoken over the short tune of “You Can Get Anything You Want at Alice's Restaurant,” about an arrest for littering that led to his draft deferment during the Vietnam War and some global conclusions, that brought the audience to its feet.The concluding “This Land Is Your Land,” interrupted by reminiscences, almost anti-climactic, nevertheless heightened the experience.The Guthrie Family Legacy Tour playing in Tavernier consisted of Arlo, daughter Sarah Lee and son-in-law Johnny Irion (a 4-year-old granddaughter also made a stage appearance), as well as son Abe Guthrie, an accomplished keyboard artist and vocalist and leader of his own Xavier band; and Gordon Titcomb, a pedal-steel artist, whose mandolin provides the punctuation to a guitar and two-keyboard (Arlo also plays one) performance.The tour, riding the Amtrak City of New Orleans train in 2006, performed benefits for the victims of Katrina, along with their record sales rising over $140,000.As to the unofficial anthems, Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land is Your Land” in 1940, adapting the tune of a Baptist hymn as a reaction to Irving Berlin's “God Bless America,” which he considered unrealistic. The latter, written and stashed in the composer's trunk while he was a soldier at Camp Yaphank, in 1918, was rescued by Kate Smith 20 years later and, most notably, sung by the members of Congress on the United States Capitol steps on Sept. 11, 2001.“America the Beautiful” was written by Wellesley English professor Katharine Lee Bates in 1882 while on a trip, put to the tune of the 1882 Baptist hymn “Materna,” composed by Samuel A. Ward, and became popular around 1910.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 6:12 PM 
